From one device, you're right. From a few tens of thousands or more, it does, and the costs of storing it all on the server add up very quickly. Even if it's only 9.6Kb/s (enough for telephony), ten thousand users adds up to around 100MB/s, or about 7.7 TB/day. With a million users, that's a pretty difficult cost to justify.

Typically, these things use a very low-power DSP to recognise the pattern of plosives and sonorants that match the trigger word. They keep a very small ring buffer of audio and wake up a more power-hungry chip if there's a possible match. They won't record all of the audio, because it would be too power hungry and they won't stream it all to a remote server because the bandwidth costs would be too high.

And California would be sucking pretty badly without Silicon Valley too.

Without Silicon Valley, California would still have Hollywood, which adds a lot to the state's economy. California would look pretty bad if you took out San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their surrounding areas, but most states would look pretty bad if you took away 75% of their population.

Agreed, and I didn't vote for him either. But the allegations never played will with me. There was no evidence, and why would it all suddenly come up a month before the election? This was a clear smear attempt.

My understanding is most server farms are connected to dedicated nuclear power plants anyway, so power consumption isn't an issue. Heat dissipation? Yeah, that might be an issue.

Heat and power are the same issue. The conservation of energy means that power in is power out, and the power out is heat that needs to be dissipated. A rule of thumb for data centres is that every dollar you pay in electricity for the computers, you need to pay another dollar in electricity for cooling. If you want high density, then you hit hard limits in the amount of heat that you can physically extract (faster fans hit diminishing returns quickly). This is why AMD's presence in the server room went from close to 100% to close to 0%: Intel was much better at low power.

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